Love him or hate him (I’m in the latter camp), Newt Gingrich reigned over the House with a clear vision for change. Because Tom DeLay followed in Newt’s footsteps as the chamber’s most powerful member, the conventional wisdom tells us that DeLay is carrying on the Gingrich/Contract with America tradition. In this case, however, the CW is anything but wise. DeLay’s leadership of the House isn’t the natural outgrowth of Newt Gingrich’s “revolution”; it’s the antithesis of it.
To be sure, both are right-wing, power-hungry demagogues. But their differences have less to do with ideology and more to do with leadership and management.
Gingrich was intent on strengthening (despite occasionally breaking) congressional ethics rules; DeLay is intent on gutting them. Gingrich lamented casual corruption that had been tolerated by a lazy Dem majority; DeLay embraces casual corruption as way to wield raw power. Gingrich was desperate to seize power; DeLay is drunk on too much power. Gingrich embraced the tenets of a Contract with America; DeLay seeks to ignore those princilpes.
They stormed into Congress a decade ago, a fresh-faced band of Republican candidates brandishing a Contract with America that promised balanced budgets, ”citizen legislators” who would serve and return to the private sector, and a restored trust in the nation’s elected leaders as the GOP took control of the House for the first time in 40 years.
But after 10 years of Republican control of the House, members of the majority party appear to have strayed from some of the promises that got them there.
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”The first thing we were asked to do [in Congress] was to raise the ethical standards, and the first thing that this new [2005] freshman class was asked to do was to lower the standards,” said Representative Zach Wamp of Tennessee, who was one of 73 newly elected Republican House members who took office in January 1995.
It’s reached the point in which Newt’s “Class of ’94” has been left out of GOP leadership positions in the House altogether.
The whole mess has prompted Quin Hillyer, who worked for Bob Livingston (who would have succeeded Newt as Speaker were it not for a sex scandal), to write a terrific piece in which he argues, persuasively, “[T]en years into the GOP revolution that Gingrich started, the ethics of Congressional Republicans can only be described as, well, offensive.”
Compare the actions taken by the GOP Congress in 1995 and 1996 to the recent actions of Congressional Republicans: Back then, House Republicans loudly trumpeted their strict new near-ban on lobbyists’ gifts to representatives and staffers; in 2003, they gutted the gift ban by raising the gift-value limit by about tenfold. Back then, they put stricter limits on the types of free junkets available to members and staff; in 2003, they exempted “charitable” junkets from those limits. Back then, they boasted about opening the legislative process to public scrutiny by making all committee hearings (unless classified for security reasons) open to the public; now, they write most of the significant parts of their bills behind the closed doors of House-Senate conferences.
There is, unfortunately, more. Gingrich made a point of promising to never let a floor vote last beyond 17 minutes. Upon assuming the speakership in 1999, Dennis Hastert made the same pledge. But in 2003, Hastert kept the vote open an hour while twisting arms on an early version of a Medicare reform bill. Five months later, he kept floor balloting open for three solid hours, beginning at 3 a.m., while furiously browbeating recalcitrant back-benchers to secure the Medicare bill’s final passage. Now he has made the extended-vote practice almost routine.
Republicans once stood foursquare against the political strong-arm tactics that Democrats used to ensure party discipline. But in 2003, during the infamous three-hour Medicare vote, GOP congressmen reportedly threatened fellow Republican Nick Smith, who had announced his impending retirement and who opposed the Medicare bill, by saying that they would sink the primary campaign of his son who was running to replace him. In the next few weeks, Smith repeatedly said he had been the target of bribery attempts; a later investigation did find that campaign money had at least been mentioned prominently during the arm twisting.
But shameful as all of this was, it turns out to have been merely a prelude to the rancid ethical display Republicans have put on to open the 109th Congress. Three times last fall alone, the bipartisan ethics committee unanimously admonished Majority Leader Tom DeLay for actions that reeked of impropriety. Rather than castigate their sharp-elbowed leader, though, the Republican conference as a whole turned on GOP ethics committee chairman Joel Hefley, who had dared to issue rebukes to DeLay. Citing term limits on ethics committee membership, the House leadership pushed Hefley out of his chairmanship. But Hefley had served only four years as chairman; the usual chairmanship limit is six years–and House leaders showed their hypocrisy by simultaneously waiving the term-limits requirement to give seventh and eighth years as chairman of the powerful Rules Committee to California’s David Dreier.
It bears repeating that Hillyer is not a liberal critic; he was a Republican staffer and is now a conservative journalist. But he’s nevertheless seen House Republicans, led by DeLay, become even worse than the fat-and-happy House Dems the GOP used to abhor.
You know it’s bad when Marshall Whitman can write, “Where have you gone Newt Gingrich, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you?” and I think he has a point.